STARKE, FL. State inspectors ordered Call Street Café at 111 Call St. shut down on October 9 after documenting simultaneous rodent, roach, and fly activity inside the restaurant, a combination of pest findings serious enough to trigger an emergency closure order.
The café had until October 10 to vacate the premises. It was cleared to reopen that same morning at 8:10 a.m., after a follow-up inspection found zero high-severity and zero intermediate violations remaining.
What Inspectors Found
Call Street Café: Recent Inspection Severity
The October 9 inspection produced 8 high-severity violations and 3 intermediate violations, the highest single-visit count the café has recorded in at least three years. Inspectors cited all three categories of pest activity, rodents, roaches, and flies, at the same time.
That combination matters. Each pest type represents a separate contamination pathway, and finding all three simultaneously indicates an infestation that has progressed beyond a single point of entry or a recent introduction.
What This Means
Rodent activity in a food service environment is treated as an immediate public health threat because rodents leave behind droppings, urine, and hair on food-contact surfaces and in stored ingredients. Unlike a spill or a temperature reading that can be corrected in minutes, rodent activity signals that animals have been moving through the space, likely repeatedly, before an inspector ever arrived.
Cockroaches carry bacteria including Salmonella and E. coli on their bodies and legs, transferring pathogens to any surface they cross. They are nocturnal and rarely visible in large numbers during daytime inspections, which means a documented roach finding during a standard inspection often reflects a larger population active at night.
Fly activity compounds both risks. Flies feed on organic waste and then land on food preparation surfaces, transferring whatever they have contacted. When inspectors document flies alongside rodent and roach evidence in the same visit, they are describing a kitchen where multiple pest populations have established themselves, not a single incident.
Florida law treats this combination as grounds for immediate closure because the risk to customers eating food prepared in that environment is not theoretical. It is direct and ongoing until the pests are eliminated and surfaces are sanitized.
The Longer Record
This was not the first time the state shut Call Street Café down. Records show the café has one prior emergency closure on record before October 9, making this its second forced shutdown.
The inspection history stretching back through 2023 shows a facility that has never cleared a routine inspection without high-severity violations. Every inspection in the data, covering visits in September 2023, March 2024, September 2024, February 2025, July 2025, and April 2026, produced between four and six high-severity citations, along with one to three intermediate violations each time.
Across 32 inspections on record, the café has accumulated 205 total violations.
That volume tells a specific story. A facility with 32 inspections and 205 violations is averaging more than six violations per visit across its entire documented history. The October 9 closure, with 8 high-severity violations alone, was not an outlier in isolation. It was the steepest point on a line that has never dipped below four high-severity findings in any recent inspection.
The café passed its follow-up inspection on October 10 and was cleared to reopen. What the record does not show is whether the underlying conditions that produced two emergency closures and 205 violations over time have been addressed beyond the immediate correction that satisfied the follow-up inspector.
What Comes Next
The October 10 follow-up found zero high-severity and zero intermediate violations, and the café was permitted to reopen at 8:10 a.m. that day. Under Florida's inspection system, that clearance reflects conditions at the moment of reinspection, not a guarantee of continued compliance.
The café's history shows a recurring pattern: violations documented, a follow-up passed, and then high-severity findings reappearing at the next routine inspection. That cycle has repeated across every inspection period in the data going back to at least 2023.
Whether the pest activity that triggered the October 9 closure, rodents, roaches, and flies all present at once, has been fully eliminated or only suppressed enough to pass a morning reinspection is a question the record cannot yet answer.
